Something amazing happened in the course of 14 hours. I couldn't have dreamed this up in a million years. In fact I'm still a bit in shock.

On Wednesday, Jan. 18 my father and I took the long drive up to Gampel Pavilion in Storrs for the Uconn men's basketball game against Cincinnati. And while nothing good came from that game — except to further cement the notion that UConn has no leadership and Shabazz Napier needs to learn to hit the open man instead of taking ridiculous shots with 2 seconds left on the clock — I was stunned by the news I got on my drive home.

 

I received a text message from Sara H. shortly after the game ended. Our Kickstarter campaign was up from 22% fulfilled to 40% — a huge leap for us. Because I'm a skeptic, I logged into my email from my cell phone and found that we had received two separate pledges while I was at the game. One for $50 and another for $10. While I was in my email another message came through. We'd received another $25 pledge. It was great momentum and had pushed us close to the 50% mark. I had been starting to wonder if we would hit our new revised goal.

 

When I got home that night I chatted with Sara for a few minutes and we geeked out over how well the Kickstarter had done that night. We were steadily earning enough pledges to help us record our new CD (due out in May). I made a passing joke: maybe when I wake up tomorrow we'll be at 50%. I didn't expect that to happen. When I woke up, however, I wasn't laughing anymore. We had received pledges overnight — one of which was for $100. We had hit 65%.

 

I was, and still, am a bit stunned. We went from little to no progress for days, idling out around $115, and then in the course of 14 hours we shot up to having $325 in pledges out of our $500 goal. As of this writing we have 15 days to go and are only $90 away from the final goal.

 

It's really an amazing feeling to see so many people rally behind you and your project. Even when someone pledges $1 you know that they're still behind you. No matter the dollar amount, at the end of the day the closer we get to our goal the more we realize that our project is important to more than just us. After four years of slugging it out, it's really nice to know that someone believes in what you're doing.